Ten years ago today, I was finishing up stuffing holiday cards for my employer when 2 beefy men asked me if i was indeed, Daniel McGowan. Once I was handcuffed and being frog-marched through the office, I knew what it was about.

At the same time, 6 of my codefendants were getting arrested at the same time. Others were receiving grand jury subpoenas as well. Sadly, all the people arrested that day became cooperating witnesses save for William Rodgers, who I knew as’Avalon’, who took his life in a county jail on the Winter Solstice, two weeks after we were arrested.

Of course, other arrests followed in the months after that, with a handful of codefendants refusing to play the game. We came together in solidarity to fight the charges and reduce the potential sentence as much as possible. For that, I will always have gratitude to Jonathan Paul, Nathan Block and Joyanna Zacher (though it would be disingenuous for me to not point out the latter two peoples’ identification with esoteric fascist movements currently).

I was bonded out of jail, fought my case on house arrest for a year and months after that, worked out a plea that did not involve naming names or becoming a witness against anyone. It had repercussions for me including more time and no protection from grand juries (and surely, two years later, i was called before one as a witness and put on civil contempt of court). That said, I cannot have seen it going any other way. My regrets with the case is that more of my co-defendants did not stick with us and move forward together-something that had been the idea when worst case scenarios had been discussed years prior.

10 years later, its obvious to me every time i go to any activist event that many younger activists do not know this history. I suppose it is the struggle we all face-how to remember and memorialize, but not live in the past and nostalgia. I can tell people to watch If a Tree Falls or read Green is the New Red (thanks, Marshall Curry, Sam Cullman & Will Potter) but that is an incomplete picture. How then, do we, move forward in our fight for justice and pass on to others what we learned? Its a longer question.

I use the word “I” often in this post and perhaps others as I am talking about the past but at no point have I ever felt alone and not connected to others. Without these stalwart, loyal and amazing people in my life, I know with certainty that things would have gone a totally different way:

Jenny Malone- my former partner and best friend. The rock. The Wizard of Oz behind every aspect of the support campaign and the ‘trying to keep me sane’ campaign. G.O.A.T. EXES 4EVAH!

My family especially my sister Lisa who funded my legal defense, let me live with her while on house arrest and did not waver or flinch one time. These people taught me loyalty.

Family and Friends of Daniel McGowan better known as FAF.This small group worked their asses off, put on so many shows, sold a zillon t-shirts, made my court dates, wrote articles, supported me mentally, emotionally and financially, put their lives on hold for some time to make sure I would have a life to come home too. So much gratitude to all of them. I am not even in touch with all of them, which to be honest, saddens me but I have nothing but lifelong gratitude for all of them. Shoutouts to Andrew, Ainsley, Eliza, Kitty, Corey, Sideshow, Cindy, Marianne and Ryan.

This article may be the best article I have seen on the topic though its quite dated. Check it out.

Rebecca Rubin is serving a 5 year sentence for her role in a series of Earth Liberation Front (ELF) actions including the arson of the Vail Ski Resort Expansion and US Forest Industries. She also participated in the liberation of horses and the arson of Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Wild Horse Facilities in Litchfield, California and Burns, Oregon. Rebecca is expected to be released in September, 2017.

Justin Solondz pleaded guilty to conspiracy and arson for his involvement in the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) arson of the University of Washington’s Center for Urban Horticulture in 2001 and the Romania Chevrolet dealership in Eugene, Oregon. Justin was imprisoned in China for three years prior to extradition. His anticipated release date is 9/23/2017.

From the 28th August to the 2nd September 2015, the Reclaim the Fields International Action Camp drew over 130 people to Wrexham, North Wales, to resist the ‘North Wales Prison Project,’ the construction of Europe’s second largest prison. Held at Borras Community Protection Camp, a site camp established to oppose fracking in the area, the gathering sought to link land struggles with resistance to the prison industrial complex (1) and ongoing mechanisms of state violence and dispossession.

Connecting the dots

From Saturday to Monday, a comprehensive programme of workshops, discussions and practical activities took place. People connected the dots between struggles around the prison system, food sovereignty, borders, and other aspects of the world post-enclosures. Several workshops explored the brutality of the prison system, introducing the P.I.C., ongoing struggles around IPP prisoners, nonhuman prisons and how prisons relate to gender and queer struggles, and over the course of the weekend a permaculture design was developed for the camp and people began work on a herb garden, biochar system and solar panels for the site.

Never alone, Never forgotten

Throughout the camp several actions took place. In the evenings, folk took sound systems, megaphones, and other noise making instruments to local prisons determined to show prisoners they are not forgotten and not alone. HMP Stoke Heath, HMP Drake Hall and HMP Altcourse were all visited, with many prisoners shouting back and banging their doors. Chants like “If you hate the screws, clap your hands” rang out under a full moon.
As part of the International Week of Solidarity for Anarchist Prisoners, children at the camp made a banner for UK anarchist prisoner, Emma Sheppard. Letters were written and prisoner stories shared. Banners were also made for comrades on tag and repressive bail conditions who couldn’t make the physical gathering.

In the Streets

There were also highstreet actions, with folk leafleting Wrexham about the prison and how they can get involved in fighting it. On Monday a protest was staged at P&A Landscaping. They are the prison’s landscapers and have supplied several fences and materials to the jail. In response their public garden centre was visited and customers were informed about their role in prison expansion.

Day-long Blockade of the Prison

On Tuesday 1st September, around 20 people blockaded the three access gates to the Wrexham Mega-Prison’s construction site. This simple action was easy to co-ordinate, and with confused and unprepared police and site staff, had a big effect with very little effort. A queue of trucks were prevented from entering and exiting the site, including a huge cement delivery which had to be turned away before it spoiled. Simon Caron, Project Director for Lend Lease, begged protesters to let it in saying, “We’ve been reasonable letting you protest, please just allow this one to get through”. No one budged and vehicles delivering materials failed to enter. […]

Suppliers targeted regionally

As camp participants networked and bonded, regional groups formed to take actions against local targets in their own areas. One group visited the Gloucestershire offices of Precast Erections Ltd, the company supplying concrete blocks used to build the prison. More actions are planned. Contact your local group to find out how you can get involved in Community Action on Prison Expansion.

Solidarity Protest at the Court

On Wednesday 2nd, people from Reclaim the Fields supported a local woman, Vanda Gillett who had been charged with assault during the Barton Moss Community Blockade. Following a guilty verdict, anger erupted in her defence. The court was occupied and ‘scuffles’ with the police took place outside. Four people were arrested and people moved to demonstrate at the police stations where they were being held. […]

Due to the arrests and priority of station support, further actions in Manchester were postponed, however local people motivated by the anti-prison struggle are keen to continue to target local companies and delay the construction of this super prison.

Reclaiming the Fields, Reclaiming our Lives

Reclaim the Fields is a constellation of people and collective projects willing to go back to the land and reassume the control over food production. We are determined to create alternatives to capitalism through cooperative, collective, autonomous, real needs oriented small scale production and initiatives, putting theory into practice and linking local practical action with global political struggles.

This camp is one part of our story (read the UK history here). We are not a ‘campaign’ or ‘coalition’ or a ‘mass movement’. We are diverse people, projects and struggles converging and diverging all over Europe. The manifold of ways in which capitalist economics comes to dominate the land (whether that be through the construction of prisons, drilling for gas or the exploitation of industrial agriculture) implicates and connects us all. While gatherings and action camps can be politically limited, they are not the be-all or end-all of our work. They are points of encounter, a chance for comrades to meet and critically reflect on how these struggles shape our lives. […]

The gathering came alive through the work of an incredible group of people working collectively and horizontally. Numerous ex-prisoners and people who have supported loved ones through jail were present and moved by the experience. The passion and the hate for the prison system was very present and very visible. As was the desire for something more, for growing food, reclaiming land and living differently.

We will continue our work to reclaim our lives from the state, from our capitalist economic system and oppressive prison society. Until All Are Free!

The statement lays out a framework for Black solidarity with Palestinian liberation and calls for exploring the connections between Palestinian and Black liberation as well as the oppressive linkages between the United States and Israel. The statement calls for support of boycott, divestment and sanctions efforts against Israel and calls attention to Israel’s oppression of African-descended populations in Palestine.

Davis Bailey has written for Ebony, Mondoweiss, Truth-Out and elsewhere. I caught up with him to find out more about “Black for Palestine” and the opportunities and challenges it presents.

Jimmy Johnson: Thanks for taking the time to talk with me today. Please introduce yourself.

Kristian Davis Bailey: My name is Kristian Davis Bailey and I’m one of the co-organizers of the “Black For Palestine” statement. I’m currently a freelance writer based in Detroit.

JJ: Can you tell me a bit about the “Black For Palestine” statement and the process of creating it?

KDB: The statement emerged out of two separate statements that I and my co-organizer Khury Petersen-Smith had organized last summer during the height of the assault on Gaza. We’d each found ourselves unable to publish our statements while the media would pick it up so we figured that this year we would combine our efforts to write a statement on the anniversary of the assault on Gaza which wound up being much bigger than what each of us had organized the summer before.

It is worth noting that some of the key signatories this year had also signed last year. The Organization for Black Struggle in St. Louis had signed on to last year’s statement before Mike Brown was killed and connections were being made to Palestine. Hopefully we’ll publish those earlier statements soon.

JJ: You bring up a good connection with the Organization for Black Struggle because the release of this statement is not only the anniversary of the attack on Gaza but also something going on in the US. Can you make that connection? Both your intentions around the timing of the release, as well as the connections you see there.

KDB: It was really important for us to note that the statement emerged out of the past year of solidarity between the Black and Palestinian struggles, specifically: connections people were making on the ground in Ferguson to Palestine. I think none of the developments in the past year would have happened if people on the ground hadn’t themselves started to organically connect what they were witnessing in terms of military vehicles in their communities, being tear-gassed and shot at during protests, if they hadn’t connected those things to what they were seeing in Palestine and if Palestinian organizers hadn’t reached out in solidarity to the people in Ferguson.

What the statement represents is how firm of a connection there is for organizers in St. Louis with the Palestinian struggle. It’s not just a slogan we’ve used at protests but something that people facing the brunt of repression and doing the majority of the organizing on the ground have decided to be a part of themselves. I think that’s why St. Louis is the most represented city on the statement in terms of organizational signatories.

JJ: It sounds kind of like the development and the recruitment of the signatories is really based in joint work that’s being done together.

KDB: Right. Most of the people who signed the statement, whether they’re individuals or organizations, have been actively engaging with Palestine well before the last year. There were a lot of old school organizers who have been doing this solidarity work since the ’60s and ’70s that signed on, in addition to groups like the Dream Defenders which over the past few years have started to engage more with the Palestinian issue. So, I forget what your question is but my answer is “yes” [laughter].

JJ: A Kenyan author named Mukoma Wa Ngugi gave a presentation a few years back at Wayne State here in Detroit and he was talking specifically about relations between African migrants and Black Americans and he talked about the way that white supremacy forms a veil that literally colors the relationships between these two groups but also between all groups, although the details are different for any two groups.

And one of the things he mentioned was that the only way to get past this is to put in work together to supersede and subvert this veil that colors the relationships between, for example, Black folks and Palestinians, Black folks and Arab folks. That sounds a little bit like what’s going on.

KDB: Again I’ll focus on St. Louis because that’s a story I know a little bit about. The solidarity organizing between the Organization for Black Struggle and the St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee has been going on for at least three or four years. The two groups both worked together to oppose Veolia being given a contract to privatize the city’s water, both recognizing what Veolia was doing in occupied Palestine and for the danger it presented to the people in St. Louis.

The Organization for Black Struggle was also crucial in a cultural boycott action. I don’t know how many years ago it was but it was Organization for Black Struggle organizers who said, “We will pull out of this event unless these artists are disinvited.” That was the work of very principled solidarity on the part of the St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee.

At the same time you have a Palestinian member of the solidarity committee whose father is a shop owner in a predominantly Black part of St. Louis and what he had been working on was to take all of the hard liquor out of his store after he was realizing the impact it was having on the Black community in St. Louis. He also set up a couple of initiatives to contribute some of the profits from his shop to local organizing efforts in the community.

I wanted to offer that as a real solid example of what Palestinian solidarity in the US, or not even solidarity but direct action against anti-Blackness looks like, and that’s an example of some of the principled actions and alliances that preceded the Ferguson-Palestine connection and solidarity.

JJ: This isn’t the first statement of Black solidarity with Palestine. Can you contextualize this action a bit in the internationalism of the radical Black tradition?

KDB: Definitely. So Black support for Palestine comes out of the tradition of Black internationalism within the radical segment of our liberation struggle. Malcolm X was talking about the dangers of Zionism in the 1960s. The Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee released its statement at the same time the Black Panther Party was training with the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] in Algeria.

In 1970 you had a group of prominent Black activists or scholars take out a New York Times ad supporting Palestinian liberation from Zionism and some of those signatories also signed our statement today in 2015. So there is a rich tradition of Black solidarity with international struggles broadly, and specifically with Palestine. I definitely contextualize this statement within that broader history of Black internationalism.

JJ: What would you say is the purpose of releasing this statement beyond a symbolic declaration of solidarity?

KDB: There are a couple of things. There is the suggestion that both Black and Palestinian people, and people around the world that support us, can join very targeted campaigns against companies that profit from the oppression of both groups, such as G4S and Veolia. Beyond that one of my individual hopes as an organizer is that this represents the current chapter of the Black liberation movement getting involved in the international arena once again to the degree that we were in the ’60s and ’70s. Because I think a lot of that momentum and a lot of those alliances were very intentionally targeted or repressed in the ’80s up through today even.

JJ: Some of the work being done to reignite alliances that were built between radical groups in the 1960s and ’70s, we’ve seen some attempts of that where there is a flattening effect. For example non-Black people of color using a people of color paradigm and erasing the specificities of anti-Blackness. Can you talk a little bit about the opportunities presented by “Black For Palestine” to engage not only Palestinian liberation but the specificity of anti-Blackness in solidarity?

KDB: Definitely. I’m glad you raised that because one of the points of reference I organize from is the understanding that white supremacy affects different groups in different ways here in the United States. So the anti-Black racism and the anti-Blackness that we experience and live under is of a distinct nature from the anti-indigenous or genocidal policies that indigenous folks here have experienced, is distinct from the experiences of non-Black, non-indigenous immigrants to this country.

A lot of times what happens is the differences between these groups are flattened out where we say “people of color” and we talk about how people of color are oppressed under white supremacy without acknowledging the power dynamics that are at play between our communities — so without acknowledging that every non-Black ethnic group or immigrant group in the United States is complicit in anti-Blackness or anti-Black racism.

One of the things that I hope comes up in discussions is a very critical examination of the ways that Palestinians — or just non-Black people in the United States — participate in anti-Blackness. So that for me represents a difference between joint struggle and maybe solidarity, where under joint struggle we acknowledge the different relations in terms of power between our communities and how that impacts how we relate to each other and how we organize.

So I think there’s a lot of room coming out of this statement for folks to organize around Arab anti-Black racism or for Palestine supporters who aren’t Arab to organize against their own anti-Blackness or their position as settlers in a settler colonial society.

JJ: One thing that stands out among many parts of the “Black For Palestine” statement is the phrasing that “Israel’s widespread use of detention and imprisonment against Palestinians evokes the mass incarceration of Black people in the US, including the political imprisonment of our own revolutionaries.” So can you expand upon this idea of the colonial, carceral state?

KDB: Sure. The first thing I want to talk about is how incredibly powerful of an experience and expression it was to have 10 currently incarcerated political prisoners respond to our call for signatures and sign the statement from behind bars. Their participation in our statement highlights the fact that they’re also a population whose liberation from the prison-industrial complex we need to be fighting for.

Also they represent the internationalism and revolutionary spirit that was intentionally targeted and killed from the 1980s onward. So their participation and inclusion in this statement is a link back to that era, specifically Mumia Abu-Jamal and Sundiata Acoli. Beyond that one of the things I’m thinking of about that line on mass incarceration is the need to abolish prisons.

There is different rhetoric around prisons in Palestine and here in the US but I do think they’re similar enough in the sense that we often don’t think of people arrested for drug crimes in the US as political prisoners but they are imprisoned under a very intentional political system that discriminates against them across every point of the so-called justice system.

The need to criminalize the existence or resistance of populations under settler colonialism leads to mass or hyper incarceration both in the United States and in Palestine and that prison abolition in that context is something we need to center.

JJ: What can Palestinian and Black people learn from each other?

KBD: From Palestinians we learn the importance of struggling for self-determination — a right that Black people in the US have never experienced, from our ancestor’s forcible kidnapping to this continent and the end of the Civil War through today. This is a right that Palestinians refuse to let go of through their sumoud, or steadfastness — and it is a right that Black people must claim as well.

The Black for Palestine statement highlighted the right of return as the most important aspect of justice for Palestinians because it cuts to the core of the “conflict” and is dismissed by Zionists and the US as “unrealistic.” For Palestinians to cling to and achieve the most “impossible” of their calls would be a boon to us, as we still fight for the “unrealistic” demands of reparations for our ancestors’ free and forced labor, or the abolition of prisons and the police.

The call for boycott, divestment and sanctions also models what it might look like for Black people in the US, across our varying political ideologies, to present basic criteria for us to exercise our own right to self-determination and to present basic actions people around the world can take to help us actualize our self-determination.

Our post-civil rights condition and the post-apartheid South African condition drive home the necessity for Palestinians to demand economic restructuring and safeguards both against decades of disinvestment and against neoliberal forces within the Palestinian political class. Full justice for Palestinians makes the case stronger for our own organizing in the US; full justice for Black Americans or South Africans makes the case stronger for Palestinians. I see each of these struggles as my own, because a victory for one group is a victory for us all. That is what motivates my work on this issue.

JJ: What kind of opportunities do you think “Black For Palestine” opens up for organizational solidarity with Black people in Palestine, be those articulated to the Israeli settler society or native Black Palestinians?

KDB: I think it opens up a lot of opportunities. One idea that has already come up as a result of the statement is bringing a delegation of African Palestinians here to the US so organizers can engage with them because too often they’re a population that gets erased from the narratives about Palestine within our own movement spaces here in the United States. And I know that there is already ongoing efforts between groups like the Dream Defenders and Black Youth Project 100 to connect Black and Brown people in the United States with the different African populations in historic Palestine, whether that is Ethiopian Israelis, Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers or African Palestinians.

This work is already happening so I think the statement is just another step for potential organizing between Africans in historic Palestine and Black people in the US.

We live in an inherently twisted society punishes those who rob banks rather than punishing those who them. This seems more than just a little bit unreasonable to me, given that the obscenely wealthy shouldn’t store all of their ill-gotten loot in concentrated places and then irrationally expect the rest of us not to have designs on divesting them of it.

Banks are the most prominent symbol of our culture’s blind adherence to the institution of property. The fact that thousands upon thousands of banks open up bright and early, six days a week, and close at the end of business with rarely ever a single robbery speaks to just how completely we are caught up in the delusion of capitalism’s legitimacy.

Some of the most famous figures in American history were bank robbers: Jesse James, Butch Cassidy and the Sun Dance Kid, Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger. Robin Hood is a kind of universal archetype, the model bank robber from an era before the existence of banks.

It’s both curious and appalling that we have these buildings all around us just filled with cash while many of us are barely scraping by and struggling for fundamental necessities. We routinely walk past these cash warehouses, with holes in our shoes and our stomachs grumbling.

A friend of mine, who was more often a successful bank robber than an unsuccessful one, shared with me his observation that, during bank robberies, police never want to catch bank robbers inside the bank. There’s an old movie called, “Dog Day Afternoon,” where two bank robbers are inside the bank when the police arrive, and the robbery turns into a prolonged hostage situation. Police want to avoid that, so, according to my bank robber friend, they never respond immediately. They’d rather let you get out of the bank where they can arrest you on the street, or chase you, or follow you with helicopters. So, that gives you some time to grab a substantial amount of cash.

Also, according to my friend, most bank tellers are trained to do as you instruct. So, if you hand them a note with instructions not to trigger the alarm in the drawer, not to include dye packs in the money bag, and not to put a GPS locator in with the cash, they’re supposed to comply. Banks don’t want tellers to defy bank robbers, get caught doing it, and end up getting somebody killed.

For a period of time in the late 1990s, bank robberies had one of the highest rates of unsolved crimes. Robbing banks was pretty fashionable. In fact, in the Cleveland area, there was one guy who successfully robbed several banks and in each robbery he left on foot. The guy didn’t even have a car. Authorities voiced a hunch that he was probably homeless.

Well, he was homeless when he started the crime spree, anyway.

I would suggest that in this modern era, BANK robbery is no longer bank ROBBERY. Consider: In 2008, when greedy banksters bottomed out the global economy, George W. Bush and his treasury guy, Larry Summers, who was himself an alumni of the Lehman Brothers/CitiBank locker room, decided the banks were “too big to fail,” and offered billions of dollars in bail-outs. They gave the banksters money that the government took from you in taxes. When Obama came into office, he got together with his treasury guy, Timothy Geitner, also an alumni from the same crowd of usual suspects, and they continued the billion-dollar bail-outs.

So, that means all of those banks that won’t willingly give you any loans have their vaults and registers filled up with YOUR money. So, I would suggest to you that it’s not robbery to take what’s already yours; it’s re-appropriation. That’s no crime. The real crime is letting a single bank get away with keeping it.

Think about it. To be successful, all you really need are pistols, ski masks, dufflebags, and an assertive sense of indignation. If we all did it, you know, like setting up an International Bank-Fund Re-Appropriation Day or something, the whole banking system would collapse. It would cease to exist. We would have a future without banks.

So, if you dream of such a future just as I do, I encourage you to act. After all, that dream is “too big to fail.”

This is anarchist prisoner Sean Swain from Warren Correctional Institution in Lebanon, Ohio. If you’re listening, you ARE the resistance…

I don’t believe in the right. Life, which is all a manifestation of incoherent forces, unknown and unknowable, rejects the human artificiality of the right. Right was born when life was taken away from us. Indeed, originally, humanity had no right. It lived and that was everything. Today, instead, there are thousands of rights; one could accurately say that everything which we have lost we call right. I know that I live and that I desire to live. It is most difficult to put this desire into action. I am surrounded by a humanity that wants what everyone else wants. My isolated affirmation is a most serious crime. Laws and morals, in competition, intimidate and persuade me. The “blonde rabbi” [I.e., Christ or Christian values.-translator] has triumphed. One prays, one implores, one curses, but one does not dare. Cowardice, caressed by Christianity, creates morality, and this justifies baseness and begets renunciation. […] “Society, on the other hand, modest and clean in appearance, but horribly infected with gangrene throughout its body, makes me vomit, fills me with horror and loathing, kills me.” How I envy the great Bonnot! “Il me faut vivre ma vie!” (“It is necessary that I live my life” — from the known “defense” of the French illegalist Jules Bonnot)Bruno Filippi

(Italian anarcho-nihilist who was charged with several armed attacks and was killed by a bomb he carried, on September 7th, 1919, when trying to place it to the “Nobles Club”, headquarters of the wealthiest Italian businessmen)

Beyond the right and the wrong…

For Anarchy
The most important and nicest things are spoken in the simplest way. Today, though, the reality of our lives is far from simple. So, we often note that the most complicated (and boring, at the same time) words the political delivery “specialists” and the “revolutionary” rhetoric alchemists use, the most uninvited their oversimplifications are. The theorists “rebels” construe the world through the tyranny of their “obvious truths”. Their whole rhetorical calcification and their wooden words, that lulls to sleep through their undeviating dogmatism, comes to transfer “social revolution” to a oversimplified version of the eternal fight between the “good” people and the “bad” state, between the “right” and the “wrong” fairytale.

But if things were that simple, why hasn’t this fairytale, for centuries, come to an end, with the triumph of the “good” and for all of us to “live happily ever after”?

Especially today, when power is not centralist and abstracted to the king’s throne, however, it is spread inside the transparent social factory, both our anarchist words and our actions ought to deepen more and tear the “religious” missals and the aphorisms of the “good” and “bad” and “right” and “wrong” lack of depth.

Power is not just unfair, bad and malicious, that the most we denounce, even violently, will draw back for the rebels’ right to come off.

Power is a social relation, a social hierarchical organization model, a way of life management.

In addition to its directorates and its officials, it owes its own preachers, its mentors, its advisers, its jesters, its armed defendants of course, its loyal followers, even its inside objectors – usurpers…

It’s not just a bad oligarchic elite∙ it is an intricate system of relations that defines our everyday lives.

We know, of course, that if you cut the snake’s head, the rest of the body, after a few convulsions, stops… Power, however, has proven to be more like Hydra.

This is why, while our armed targeting gathers its firepower on the heads of the managers of power and their uniformed mercenaries, our words seeks to blow up the social relations that give rise to power. Let’s keep in mind that the phrase “no one is indispensable” goes for the power, as well. If we don’t hit both the heart of the beast (armed attacks against the officials of the power) and the veins of the social machine (criticism and rejection of the submission mindset), then, maybe, soon, after every attack of ours, we will hear “the king is dead, long live the new king”. Because unless slaves, even when they revolt, deeply renounce the mindset of submission, they will soon wish to crown their new king, next to the corpse of the former.

This is why the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire, FAI/IRF and the “political” groups in affinity, that form the stripe of black anarchy, both in the proclamations following our attacks, and in our texts, use heretic – provocative words, that do not comply with the traditions of the revolutionary automatism of the dipole “good – bad”, “fair – unfair”… We always have the sledgehammer of rudeness available, in order to shatter the window of the good and innocent society and highlight its guilty silence and frustrating passivity.

Of course, through our criticism we do not aim to build the crystal tower of the “revolutionary” self-admiration. This is why we detest the conceit and the arrogance that we sometimes find in our circles, by people who are alternative artists of nothing, not anarchists of praxis.

Our aim is to disassemble the stereotypes and the prevailing morality that poison our lives, through the small and the large informal power representations (family, school, work, relationships).

Our way is challenge and not a political politeness that caresses the ears of the repressed ones audience, most of whom don’t even bother to read a proclamation. An inconvenient truth is more inelegant but it is also more liberating than a pleasant lie…

So, it’s not enough to talk about the “right” of the repressed ones, the proletarians, the people’s…

First of all, the “fair” and the “unfair” is a moral subjectivity of the reality impression. There’s no such thing as an objectivity scale that defines what’s right and what’s wrong.

Power and the capitalistic management of it, along with the armed enforcement of their truth, they have their own think tanks, their own arguments, their own culture, their own civilization, their own suggestion of a way of life. Power does not dominate only supported by the power of its arms’ barrels, but also (supported) by its persuasion and its propaganda.

This is why anyone who makes the mistake to talk about the “right” of the many, will have to be careful because the interpretation of the “right” as a quantitative measurement unit, will not… prove them right. The right of the many is often the right of the viewers, the consumers, the voters’… The anarchist struggle is not about counting participation, nor does it have to do with the majority’s right. It is something much bigger than the conflict between the “right” and the “wrong”… It is a constant war between different values, a war that bisects society in two parts. The one part is the world of anarchy and the other part is the world of power and organized tedium. In this conflict, several people, who are excluded from the privileges of power, poor and oppressed, stands shoulder to shoulder with their elite rulers’ interests. The mass is usually fond of the mediocre, the immobility of habit, the rigidity of prudence and afraid of the new, the radical, the unknown of insurrection.

The bureaucratic tense inside the official anarchism and its communist components use the rhetoric of the “common good” and the “just of the oppressed ones”, thinking there is a conscious proletarian class, which will turn into the basic ingredient of “social revolution”, as long as it has its ears caressed.

We, on our part, want to set the conditions for the creation of a confrontational anarchist affinity between groups, cells and individuals, which are will transfer the experience of rupture with the existent immediately, here and now.

This way, a dangerous enemy in the heart of the beast can be formed, aiming to the diffusion of anarchy.

For this to happen, we have to make the conflict with authority permanent, to create a short circuit in the neurons of the system, to exploit and expand the contradictions of society, to provoke social peace, to qualitatively deepen anarchist thought and aggressively upgrade anarchist action, to challenge law and order. to overcome the moral denunciation of the injustices of authority and to prepare the war against it by promoting the new anarchist urban guerrilla.

Here follows the strategic matter between the moral impeachment of system and the continuous attack. The biggest part of the anarchist milieu in Greece is usually navigating through the maelstrom of events resulting from short circuits of authority. Occasional demonstrations and sometimes conflicts in an anti-war demonstration, student marches, strikes. The recent three-year “drought” of social mobilizations caused the “drought” of violent clashes in the streets of the metropolis.

The people didn’t take the streets and anarchists were insufficient in creating their own autonomous collective violent actions. This is the result of a conscious and subconscious (because of a habit) strategy, which presents anarchists as the violent reflex of “the sense of justice” of the masses. There is, namely, a certain timidity for the anarchist attack to be organized and expressed autonomously without moral coverage from the masses. In fact, of course, there is no moral cover in large social protests either, as the mass of protesters is a diverse crowd, from which, some believe in peaceful protest, others are professional walkers and members of unions and parties, others are angry and want to clash, others operate as internal repression, others are not members of some group… The issue is that the strategy of social counter-violence as a moral justification – response of the oppressed, is not defined by us at a time when authority can set alternative questions and the answers of the masses can come, not as a rupture, but as consent to them.

So, by waiting for the next social explosion, the next rally, the next big march, we abandon our ideas and actions in luck. But even when the social tension takes place, in order for us to get lost in the riots, we look like stowaways who jump in the last car of the train, a train that others drive on different tracks from ours. Even if we derail the train it will soon return on its rails.

Obviously, in no case do we advocate our absence from the field of metropolitan riots whose context we do not define (student rallies, anti-war mobilizations, large marches), in the name of a supposed anarchist purity. Within these mobilizations we can organize attacks against cops, burn banks, destroy cameras, expropriate shops, break the peace in the metropolis.

All these are intense and pleasant moments that, however, when not accompanied by a wider anarchist plan, end up staying isolated moments and beautiful memories, that just wait for the next march to be repeated. They lose the overall perspective and the potential to sharpen the attack and to make the tension in our lives permanent. This is the result of not only the lack of operational planning, but mainly of overall perception.

The notion of moral vindication of social counter-violence solely in response to systemic anomalies (violence of cops, racist attitudes, employers’ “arbitrariness”, harsh laws) incorporates the denouncement of system (even with violent form) and prevents the passage from the defensive counter-violence, to the aggressive continuous challenge of anarchist urban guerrilla.

We, on our part, want to articulate and organize a proposal of continuous attack, a complete anarchist plan, an insurrection that does not stop when the masses withdraw from their protests, but continues to feed from its fires,to grow big and to be diffused …

We feel like the hands of our clock have stopped in the moment of attack. We do not now need neither a cause, nor the moral justification. We know that the ugliness of this world is only repealed when one acts.

Our proposal is to create an informal network of anarchist cells that will promote the continuous attack against authority and society.

Many anarchists fear the word “organization” in the way Christians fear the devil.

Others misunderstand and confuse the meaning of organization with bureaucratic fossils of Marxist centralized organizations, central committees, hierarchies, simple members, constipated rules, obligatory moral guidelines, statutes and enlightened vanguardism… Others prefer the alternative ways, sureness, adventurism and safety of an anarchist lifestyle, rather than an organized anarchy and a dangerous internal enemy that attacks without looking for pretexts as the causes are more than enough …

Some will hastily become indignant, saying that organization kills spontaneity, individuality and desires…

Let’s say, however, what we mean by “anarchist organization”… Anarchist organization is the living mental and physical coordination of a group of comrades, in order to carry out a certain plan. The more complete that plan is, the more comprehensive is the relationship of group’s comrades while the commitment and consistency have as a measure, the power of desires to achieve the plan and not the discipline of a military duty. Each comrade is unique and independent within the group and through the collective life and action of the cell, discovers and releases more of himself. There is no membership card, but only the individual desire to take part in something genuinely collective.

Of course, organization is not an end in itself, it is the means to get where we want. This means that an anarchist organization, an anarchist cell, must keep its procedure under constant review, to develop its relations, to upgrade its actions, to sharpen its theory, so that it comes closer to the purpose of its formation.

It is only logic that within an anarchist group come up tensions, contradictions, anger and even potential departures. This is because every human relationship is confrontational, sometimes at the level of evolution and sometimes at the level of rupture.

The sure thing is that the existence of informal anarchist organizations and direct action cells fuel anarchist violence against authority.

Every anarchist group is a living war outbreak against the system. Through discussion, friction and composition within a group of comrades, anarchist action evolves, the threat of an organized internal enemy becomes permanent, the means of attack are upgraded, thought gets sharpened and the plan of the destruction of authority and the social machine is promoted.

We know no team can develop those associations of strength in order to decapitate the beast of authority and its products by itself. Nevertheless, even so, the comrades of the group, through their action, free themselves from the conventions of a world that wants us to be spectators of our lives. But if we want to maximize our action, satisfying more and more our desires, we can try to create informal coordination of individuals, groups and affinity cells which promote the anarchist urban guerrilla. The creation of such coordination is not subject, in any case, of the crucible of the quantitative centralism, which crushes the autonomy of each one of us. We are not interested in creating a central super-structure which will cause the creation of central committees and informal hierarchies. We are simply talking about coordinating groups and people looking towards the same direction. We are talking about the coordination of desires that become more dangerous when they are communicated and shared by accomplices.

The basic agreement within such an organization is the desire not to be a moment of truce with the enemy. Without, therefore, waiting for a favorable wind of social change to act, we decide to arm ourselves and turn our lives into a confrontational reality now. So we do not limit ourselves to the anniversary symbolism (this does not mean that we are absent from the days of wrath and vengeance in memory of our dead), we do not expect fixed appointments, waiting the state to get out of line causing the people to demonstrate, nor are we satisfied by opportunistic street fights with cops, in order to pretend that we’ve executed our “duty” to the struggle.

This does not make us arrogant to devalue everything from the balcony of an ideological purity. On the contrary, it makes us more prepared to throw ourselves in those battles that we will choose, even in intermediate social struggles, which we think are of interest (i.e. student occupations) without being disoriented by the circumstances.

The compass of organized expression points steadily towards the the intensification of the attack and the diffusion of our theory. The words “anarcho-nihilism”, “black anarchy”, “anarchist terrorism” are truly dangerous, when tested in the heat of battle.

The constant challenging of the enemy through autonomous guerrilla strikes (using the fan of the diversity of means, but with the constant desire of upgrading to armed guerrilla) and organized aggressive intervention to intermediate social struggles are part of the anarchist war. We say again, that the effectiveness of the strategy will not be measured by the figures of participation.

We want to create the possibilities of acting with people who feel stifled in the social cages imposed on them by authority and want to rebel… Our joy is great in any such new meeting with new comrades who bear the sign of complicity. No matter their numbers … What is important is that the effort is worth it…

“I am not led by the will of the masses. Nor do I mourn for the sorrows of the people. I never accepted the fate of the slave that was prepared for me, I didn’t speak their language, nor imitated their look. I refused to be with the many. My demons never sleep… I always long for the unsatisfied. And when they set fire to the foundations of society, they don’t daydream on the ashes. They are seeking wildly for the next scarecrow of authority to surrender it to the stake. They do not get comfortable, nor do they rest, they want war with everything that haunts our lives.

They say that whoever loves debris, also loves and statues. My demons live in the debris because nobody can hide there. The material of which each of us is made, is revealed there. You will find me among them, where the battle is raging”…

This Tuesday, our comrades are embarking on a two-month tour of the US, comprising fifty events in twenty-five states. Where our massive outreach project To Change Everything introduces anarchist ideas, on this tour anarchists from three continents will discuss their experiences acting on these ideas in a variety of struggles, movements, and uprisings.

There are still a couple days open in Southern California in late October. If you want to help us book those dates, or you would like to host future CrimethInc. tours anywhere in the world, please contact us at rollingthunder@crimethinc.com.

To Change Everything:

The Promise of Anarchism

An International Panel Discussion

This panel brings together organizers from Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and North America to discuss the significance of anarchist ideas and tactics in the 21st century.

The participants will compare experiences from the wave of protests and uprisings that has swept the world since 2010—exploring the role of demand-based politics in both catalyzing and limiting movements, examining a variety of forms of repression, and critically evaluating experiments with direct democracy. They will conclude by assessing the prospects of contemporary struggles for self-determination in an era of globalized capitalism and state control.

All of the presenters are contributors to a recent outreach and dialogue project, To Change Everything, which appeared earlier this year in over twenty languages.

Tuesday, September 15New York City, NY
This is not our standard presentation; rather, a participant in the tour will join in a discussion about the squatting movement in Ljubljana and worldwide
MoRUS Museum Storefront
155 Avenue C
Manhattan, New York City, 10009
7 pm

A year has passed since comrade Gabriel Pombo Da Silva was transferred to the Topas penitentiary centre (Salamanca). He continues to resist the harsh experience of the deprivation of liberty (after already more than 30 years behind bars), but also various stratagems that the prison administration is continuing to come up with in the best of its interests and those commanding it.

Topas prison was created as part of the program of construction of about twenty maxi-prisons promulgated in the early 90s by the PSOE government of Felipe González.

At the same time, the left and socialist head of the AP, Antoni Asunción, introduced the internal directive governing the FIES regimes. So Topas prison has the characteristics of these new mass incarceration factories – in Spain, the number of imprisoned persons has doubled in 20 years, from roughly 35 000 – 70 000 between 1991 and 2011.

One of the criteria of this modernization consists of distancing prisons from urban centres, so Topas was built in the open countryside. This serves several purposes: to hide these wretched places as much as possible; further separate those imprisoned from their loved ones, forced to travel many kilometres for any visit – (?!) luck, unlike most other jails, Topas is located along a main road served by a bus route, a ‘luxury’ that avoids the collective punishment of expensive trips or forced marches.

The distance is also intended to reduce demonstrations of solidarity in neighbourhoods as they once existed, especially when there is movement inside the prison, and to make escapes extremely difficult.

This program of new prisons is therefore the response to the waves of struggles, riots and escapes that rocked Spanish prisons regularly from the 70s to the 90s. Bringing together different types of detention inside them (remand, central etc.), these are maximum security prisons, equipped with automatic doors, increasingly sophisticated computerized control systems and a multitude of high tech devices among other things.

The size and architecture of these prisons makes it possible to lock up over a thousand prisoners in each of them, while separating them according to the requirements and experimentation of the prison management. They are in fact divided into separate autonomous buildings each with their own exercise yard, visiting areas and canteen. Any kind of interaction between the different units is carefully avoided, and prisoners have little way of knowing what is happening in the rest of the prison, which reduces the possibilities of struggles or even riots. To prevent “dangerous combinations”, it is also very easy to move a prisoner from one building to another without the need for a transfer to another jail – even if dispersion remains an effective way to punish prisoners and their relatives. After 5 transfers since arriving in Spain, Gabriel for example has already been able to discover 5 different internal modules in Topas. This organization based both on massification and atomization contributes to continuing the dirty war by breaking bonds of solidarity or encouraging rivalries and entanglements in a context of emotional and economic misery. To add a layer to the hardship and the struggle for survival, the latest find to date in Topas has been to reduce visits to two a month, to be conducted only by family or a lawyer …

Parallel to this architectural model the modern concept of scientific treatment of prisoners is also being developed. Contemporary guinea pigs, they are classified according to a long list of regimes, degrees and phases. This cataloguing is extremely precise and is carried out by a whole range of specialists (so-called “technical teams” or “trucologues [trickalogues]” as Gabriel quips, who refuses to submit to their examinations: psychologists, sociologists, educators and other social workers … ) according to essentially behavioural and disciplinary criteria.

What carries the sweet name of “individualized treatment” amounts to scrutinizing the behaviour of each prisoner to establish their profile and the treatment to be applied to them. To put it bluntly, it is a question of hitting where it hurts – knowing that this bureaucracy is also critical for exit permits and conditional liberty. All this obviously goes towards constituting huge databases and tighter control.

Beyond the regular interrogations required by these battalions of experts, daily monitoring is ensured through various means: the system of ubiquitous cameras and incident reports distributed by the screws are unfortunately often supported by the effective control of fellow prisoners.

The so-called modules of “maximum respect” of so-called “life in common” are an extreme example of this co-management. The prisoners who enter them actually undertake to respect and ensure others’ respect not only of the prison rules, but a bonus code of conduct developed for the division itself. Under cover of assessment assemblies, they are actively involved in their own imprisonment and the reign of the equilibrium that tends to generalize, that is what rehabilitation means…

Of course, the whole system functions on the strategy of carrot and stick: rewards for those who show proof of their good will with regard to the prison administration in various ways, while the closed regimes, isolation and most FIES regimes are intended to punish “conflictual” prisoners and endorse the diagnosis or prognosis of social dangerousness.

FIES 3 awaited comrades Francisco and Mónica from the start of their incarceration. Gabriel, for his part, was put in FIES 5 while he was in A Lama, and this decision has already been renewed several times by the Topas administration. Noelia Cotelo, also considered a rebel, arrive at Topas in turn, where she was immediately put in solitary confinement. She is still in FIES 5. Among other special measures, it implies that all written and verbal communications are read, photocopied, listened to and recorded and can be censored based on criteria such as the vaguest “subversive content” or “endangering security or the proper functioning of the jail.” As it happens, for the comrade it is almost all the publications of an anarchist nature that are retained, even when they meet the mandatory selective criteria of having an ISBN number and mention of the printer. Hence her request not to send letters with this kind of post as they are totally denied. Her correspondence is also subject to the limitation of two letters to be sent per week, not counting delays or “unexplained” disappearances of letters, in order to silence and isolate her most likely.

The supervising judge of the region responded to the appeal sent by Gabriel by confirming his placement in FIES, with this sentence, that does not lack flavour: “It appears from the reports received and the content of the monitoring of calls made since he has been in this detention centre that he continues to carry out an anarchist and anti-system struggle against the regime and the institutions, encouraging his relatives and friends to fight.” This speaks volumes about what the State expects from the comrade: to renounce what he believes in and what he is; harassment and dirty games involving his release date (legal recourse is still ongoing) probably intended for this and obviously failed.

The functioning and function of prison reminds us yet again that it is a denser reflection of the society that produces and needs it. From the lowest to the highest levels, the wheels that maintain the institutions and the established order, need and demand the submission of the many. It’s about breaking individuals and eliminating possibilities of struggle. Consent can be bought with shots of good and bad points, crumbs, legal and illegal drugs or it can be snatched with the most direct violence, because all means are valid in the eyes of the powerful, democratic or not.

The “humanization” of prisons sold by power and media propaganda actually conceals the attempt at depersonalisation and total dispossession, just as their alleged “social peace” is merely a more or less covert war.

Outside as inside, it’s these gears that need to be broken, along with all the physical, technological and psychological chains. Only revolt and the struggle will finish with relations based on domination and satisfy our desires for freedom.